Parade

The sun is shining!

I look out my window, an eye to the world this house has had for over a hundred years, and wonder at all the things it has seen.

Unpaved streets that would have been swampy muck-holes in this year's rain gradually became brick avenues!  Ladies dresses have gone up and down and back up from the bustles of the gay nineties to the mini skirts of the not so gay seventies and everywhere in between.

Today the brick streets are mostly covered over in asphalt and most of the women wear pants, but people still walk here, still take their dogs out to stroll around the park up the street, still push children in wheeled contraptions of all sorts.

It is a perfect place to live.  It always has been.  Two blocks west is the Constitution Trail, the old Illinois Central Railroad.  Two blocks east is the off and on affluent neighborhood that housed Adlai Stevenson.  Our garages, the ones still standing, were once barns.  Horses stamped their feet here and snuffled great whiffs of steam in the cold morning air.

Sidewalks morphed from nonexistent to brick to concrete.  Streetlights appeared.  Traffic stopped whinnying and began roaring and honking, but both emitted noise and steam and smells!

I go out for my morning walk, adding my presence to the great parade of time, imprinting my own self on this world that came before me and will go on without me.

What a magnificent day!